S4E79: Why Schedule Quality Matters with Martin Murphy

<p>On this week’s pod, we welcomed Martin Murphy to talk about why schedule quality really matters. Martin Murphy has more than 31 years of experience working with multinational companies and participating in high profile international projects, such as the Petronas Towers in Malaysia and the Panama Canal extension. He is a Director with Hill International in Spain, dealing especially with industrial, manufacturing and technological projects. Since 1992, he has been working as Project Manager and in the planning and project control departments of Spanish construction and consulting companies dealing with Claims and controlling time, cost and risk elements of projects in Spain, Europe and Latin America.&nbsp;</p> <p>The main topics we discussed on the podcast were as follows: · Projects should aim to focus as much planning work upfront as possible. This ensures you are not editing the schedule each week&nbsp;</p> <p>· Good schedules have a 3% chance of finishing on time<br> · A good schedule is like watching a video rather than a photograph<br> · Setting up the activity coding is more important than setting up the WBS<br> · A properly coded schedule is critical to successful delivery.<br> <br> You would be surprised how many people do not use this function<br> · Coding can really help with developing and leading the discussion on schedule metrics.<br> · People should think of a plan as a database.<br> <br> It needs to be organised logically to retrieve the right information at the right time. A good planner can only manage 200 activities a month. Anything more detailed may lead to being overworked and potentially degrade the quality of the schedule · Absolute duration and float duration measurements can be misleading. Should be % of remaining duration · Quick wins for managing quality schedules: o Start-Start 0 should not exist! Laziness in planning o Review the length of lags. o Never, ever use negative lags o Should only use SS/FF to draw summary bars o Activities should have a maximum of a 2 to 3-week duration.